When I work with money coaching clients, we don’t start by talking about money. We begin by discussing values. Too often, we don’t think about our values when making decisions.
These exercises help identify inconsistencies in what you say you value and what your actions indicate you truly value.
As we move into a new year and a new legislative session, it’s always interesting to see what our legislature actually values, based on their actions.
For example, the legislature talks a big game about “protecting children” but passed two pieces of legislation, SB 1329 and HB 538, which mental health professionals testified against because of the harm they would cause to children. In reality, these bills were thinly veiled attempts to perpetuate a culture war rather than provide anything of value to Idaho’s children. SB 1329, in particular, is egregious enough that they’re hoping to “fix” it.
Here in Idaho, we also claim to value mothers and babies. If that’s the case, why did we suspend the maternal review board? It was barely reinstated last year, with some of our own local “representatives,” one of them a woman, opposed to understand maternal mortality in our state. And why are our lawmakers ignoring the research that found that Texas’ draconian abortion ban has increased both infant and maternal mortality?
Idaho’s own laws have resulted in a decrease in healthcare providers that specialize in high-risk pregnancies, and providers continue to say they consider leaving the state, specifically citing Idaho’s laws.
Do we actually value women and infants? Or is it just lip service? The actions of our legislators tell a very different story than their loudly proclaimed values.
There’s a lot the legislature could be doing to improve Idahoans’ lives. We could be investing in better public schools, but instead our legislature, while pretending to support education, is preparing to siphon dollars away in a costly voucher boondoggle. They won’t call it vouchers, though. They’ll come up with nice-sounding words and claim it’s something else. Legislators spend more time trying to make something we’ve made clear we don’t want palatable rather than just fund our public education.
Our legislature is looking at how to scapegoat a small portion of our population through various bans. They talk a big game about “freedom” but spend a lot of time arguing about what we’re allowed to say in classrooms, whose existence should be policed and whether what we do in our own homes fits their narrow religious definitions as “moral.”
If they really valued freedom, education and even what makes Idahoans’ lives better, they’d spend more time looking at the property tax mess they made almost a decade ago, look at how to change the fact that Idaho has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the country and stop prioritizing a culture war that does nothing but line the pockets of conflict entrepreneurs.
But why should our legislators change? So far, we, as an electorate, haven’t prioritized holding them accountable.
Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized personal finance expert, speaker and writer. She is the vice chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.